Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Supreme Court Rebukes Administrative Branch

It was with some concern that I blogged about a case that had been
pending in the Supreme Court, pertaining to Oregon's assisted suicide law.
My concern was not about the assisted suicide per se;
rather, I was concerned about the implications for the balance of
power. Specifically, it appeared that the federal government
was trying to supersede traditional State regulation of medical
practice. Moreover, it appeared that they wanted to give a
law enforcement agency -- the DEA -- the authority to make medical
decisions.

Kennedy suggested that Ashcroft set the stage for a
"radical shift" of state power to the U.S. government. [...]

The ruling in the Oregon case comes amid a national debate over the
breadth of the executive branch's power, particularly Bush's authority
to order domestic wiretapping without court approval to fight terrorism.

The decision revealed that most of the court — even without
O'Connor, who was in the majority Tuesday — is concerned
about moves to expand executive authority.

"At one level this is a very technical, dry case about when deference
is owed (to an executive interpretation of federal law). But Kennedy is
trying to rise above the technicalities to make a point about executive
overreaching," said Vikram Amar, a professor at the University of
California's Hastings College of the Law. "Kennedy likes to remind
people of the big picture."

This "very technical, dry case" has a great many implications.
For one, it shows why the Alito nomination is so important to
a man who would be an imperial President. For another, it
illustrates why it is important to understand the implications of a law
on an abstract level, rather than focusing on the day-to-day practical
application of the law.

The justices correctly determined that the essential feature of this
case, in fact, was not about physician-assisted suicide. One
could argue the issue of assisted suicide for decades, and still not
cover all the implications. But the SCOTUS decision was not
about assisted suicide. It was about the balance of power --
within our government, but also within society at large.

In fact, the term "assisted suicide," in the context of the Oregon law,
is a misnomer. The patient are not committing suicide, in the
sense that neither they, nor their physicians, are determining whether
they will live or die. Rather, they are influencing whether
they will die today or tomorrow, in comfort, or later in the week, in
pain. To call that suicide is really an overdramatization.

The link below goes to a dummy account that automatically forwards email to the Federal Trade Commission's spam reporting service. Don't use it unless
you are a robot. Instead, act like a human and figure out the real address from this: joseph/dot/j7uy5/at-sign/gmail/dot/com

The Corpus Callosum is an occasional journal of armchair musings, by an Ann Arbor reality-based, slightly-left-of-center regular guy who reserves the right to be highly irregular at times.
Topics: social commentary, neuroscience, politics, science news.
Mission: to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy.